The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Read Free Page B

1961 when I needed to pay for a new boiler, and I felt a great relief once it was gone.
    That was my first war. I did not volunteer for my second. I knew it likely that I would soon be conscripted so chose to rely on skills learned in my first life to keep myself alive. In my third life I joined the RAF as a ground mechanic and ran for the shelter faster than any other man in my squad when the sirens went, until finally Hitler began to bomb London and I knew I could begin to relax. It was a good place to be for the first few years. The men who died nearly all died in the air, out of sight and out of mind. The pilots did not really interact with us grease men, and I found it all too easy to consider the plane my only care, and the man who flew it merely another mechanical part to be ignored and overcome. Then the Americans came, and we began bombing Germany, and many more men died in the air, where I only needed to lament the loss of their machines, but more began coming back, shot through with shrapnel, their blood on the floor just thick enough to retain the shape of the footprints that had scrambled through it. I wondered what I could do differently, with my knowledge of what was to come, and concluded that it was nothing. I knew that the Allies would win, but had never studied the Second World War in any academic detail; my knowledge was entirely personal, a thing lived rather than information to be shared. The most I could do was warn a man in Scotland by the name of Valkeith to stay in the boat two minutes longer on the beach of Normandy, or whisper to Private Kenah that there wouldbe a tank in the village of Gennimont which had turned right instead of left and was waiting between the bakery and the church to end his days. But I had no strategic information to impart, no learning or knowledge other than a declaration that Citroën would make elegant unreliable cars and one day people would look back at the division of Europe and wonder why.
    Having reasoned myself so eloquently into this position, I continued once again to have a thoroughly unremarkable war. I oiled the landing gear of the planes which would destroy Dresden; I heard rumours of boffins attempting to design a jet engine and how the engineers derided the notion; I listened for the moment that the engines of the V1s stopped, and for a brief period for the silence of a V2 that had already fallen, and when VE day came I got horrendously drunk on brandy, which I don’t particularly like, with a Canadian and two Welshmen who I’d met only two days before and who I never saw again.
    And I learned. This time I learned. I learned of engines and machines, of men and strategies, of the RAF and the Luftwaffe. I studied bomb patterns, observed where the missiles had fallen so that next time–for I felt 60 per cent confident that there would be a next time, all this again–I would have something more useful to serve myself with, and potentially others, than a few personal recollections about the quality of tinned ham in France.
    As it was, the same knowledge which protected me from the world was in later times also to put me in great danger and, by this route, indirectly introduce me to the Cronus Club, and the Cronus Club to me.

Chapter 6
    His name was Franklin Phearson.
    He was the second spy I ever met in my life, and he was hungry for knowledge.
    He came to me in my fourth life, in 1968.
    I was working as a doctor in Glasgow, and my wife had left me. I was fifty years old and I was a broken man. Her name was Jenny and I loved her and told her everything. She was a surgeon, one of the first female surgeons on the ward; I was a neurologist with a reputation for unorthodox and occasionally unethical–though legal–research. She believed in God. I did not. Much must be said of my third life, but for now let me say simply that my third death, alone in a hospital in Japan, had convinced me of the truth of nothingness. I had lived and I had died, and not Allah,